Highest Possible ACT Score

Each of the multiple-choice exams is scored on a 1-36 basis, with 36 being the highest possible. The ACT score is a composite of all the exams, which is also scored on a 1-36 basis. Thus, the highest possible score is a 36, which is the 99th percentile, meaning that 99% of all students who took the exam scored lower than that. The writing score is computed differently; it is judged by two separate judges, who evaluate the test on a 1-6 scoring basis, and their scores are combined to result in a score on a 1-12 basis, 12 being the 99th percentile score.

At this time, there is no direct conversion chart between SAT scores and ACT scores. There is difficulty in translating directly, mainly due to the fact that the ACT can have up to five separate exams whereas the SAT only has three. However, officials in the University of California system collated thousands of test scores and released a rough chart in 2006 that showed correlations between the old SAT scale (which went to 1600), the new SAT scale (2400) and the ACT scale. The ACT scores do not directly match up to individual SAT scores; rather, they correspond to ranges of SAT scores, which is roughly the same result that the College Board (the entity that administers the SATs) found after a two-year study of scores in the mid-1990s. In general, students that do well on the SATs are highly likely to do equally well on the ACTs, and vice versa.